Driving an automobile is a dangerous endeavor. In the United States alone, there were approximately 6.4 million auto accidents in 2005 resulting in $230 billion of damage, 2.9 million injuries and 42,636 deaths. Safe driving requires skill and the ability to detect and avoid dangerous situations. The detection aspect requires visual and auditory acuity. Interestingly, a minimum vision requirement is needed to obtain a driver's license but there is no corresponding auditory requirement. This is reasonably since vision is clearly the more important of the two senses for driving and it would be unfair to deprive those with hearing impairments of a driver's license. Nonetheless, the ability to hear sirens, screeching tires, collisions and horns is clearly a benefit to safe driving. In fact, the inventor has interviewed a handful of legally deaf drivers who have expressed that driving can be frightening without the ability to hear oncoming sounds.
In the United States alone, there are as many 600,000 deaf people and 6,000,000 with hearing impairment. Thus, a fairly large group of drivers is lacking full sensory perception needed for safe driving. Some may not even be willing to drive because of their hearing impairment. The present invention is intended to provide compensation for this deficit by creating a visual indication of what would otherwise be audibly detected. Specifically, through use of microphones and signal processing algorithms, an embodiment of the present invention will detect sounds, determine the direction of the sound source and visually indicate that direction. Additionally, an embodiment can also indicate the type of sound that has been detected.